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70 points marban | 2 comments | | HN request time: 0.547s | source
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r00fus ◴[] No.41873764[source]
There's a theory that life actually originated not directly through photosynthesis based life, but originally from a very constant source of energy - the earth's crust - Hyperthermophile archaea - using non-oxygen based metabolism which migrated to the surface where photosynthesis evolved and took over as the core energy source.

All laid out in Paul Davies' book - fascinating read: https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Fifth-Miracle/Pau...

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1. dyauspitr ◴[] No.41876503[source]
Didn’t we already know that? Chloroplasts are a whole different organism that was subsumed by photosynthetic organism cells much later, much like mitochondria. Moreover, isn’t the dominant hypothesis that life originated in the primordial soup, basically underwater?
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2. adrian_b ◴[] No.41877314[source]
The primordial soup hypothesis has been obsolete for decades.

It does not explain which is the source of energy. Without a continuous source of energy life cannot exist.

Moreover, it does not explain how the soup becomes concentrated enough to enable the formation of complex structures. Any primordial soup would have been too dilute for the dissolved substances to have chances to interact.

The only plausible hypotheses for the origin of life are not in the middle of a soup, but at the surface of some minerals, more likely inside pores in the minerals. The minerals must have been metallic sulfides, more precisely sulfides of iron with some content of cobalt and nickel, as these 3 metals included in sulfide clusters are the catalysts for all the chemical reactions that are necessary and sufficient for sustaining the simplest forms of life.

The catalysts Fe, Co and Ni are equally important with the structural non-metals H, C, N, O and S for the origin of life. Life is impossible without both kinds of chemical elements.